After reading The No. Alexander McCall Smith is a very white, very male Scotsman with thinning gray hair and light blue eyes. But he has one thing in common with his fictional heroine, Precious Ramotswe: a peaceful, enduring affection for Botswana and its people.
Smith, who began his career as a medical law professor, has been writing fiction for decades. Even as he taught at universities and chaired the British Medical Journal Ethics Committee, he indulged his whimsical side by writing children's stories with titles like The Bubblegum Tree and Mike's Magic Seeds.
In , at the age of 50, he published his first book about Mma Ramotswe and her adventures as a private investigator. Audiences were so taken with the playful, warm-hearted tale that Smith was able to quit his day job and focus full time on fiction. Today, Smith is a dizzyingly prolific writer, the author of 11 Ladies' Detective books and three other series. His stories are set around the world—his second-most-famous series, The Sunday Philosophy Club , follows the exploits of a mystery-solving Scottish woman named Isabelle Dalhousie.
But it's Mma Ramotswe who has inspired an HBO adaptation and continues to attract the most devoted following. I spoke to Smith about his love for Africa, his "unfashionable" optimism, and his side career as an unapologetically bad musician. Your Ladies' Detective books are written in the very convincing voice of an African woman.
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How are you able to inhabit a character who is so different from you? I suppose it's part of being a novelist that one has to be able to imagine what it's like to be another person. After a while, one can imagine what it's like to be virtually anyone. But obviously, one has to have a certain amount of experience of the world one's characters live in, and I have lived in Africa. You were born in Rhodesia, a part of Africa that has experienced a lot of turmoil. Yes, Rhodesia—now Zimbabwe—is a country that has been experiencing difficulties for a long time.
